On the road with The Startup Bus

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The wheels on the bus go round and round.
That song has been running through my head constantly over the past several days. Though it has been a long time since I’ve been on a bus this long so the lyrics “The people on the bus go up and down.” is more meaningful to me now than it has ever been… man this bus is bouncy!
As some of you may have read a few days ago we announced that Atlassian was sponsoring The Startup Bus in its journey from San Francisco to Austin, TX for SXSW interactive 2010, and I was the lucky Atlassian who was selected to go along for the ride.
I had anticipated blogging about the experience more frequently but lack of reliable wi-fi and a non stop schedule has prevented me from pushing out the great content we’ve been capturing on the bus – but what I’ve found is that when everyone leaves the bus the wi-fi works much better so I decided to take the opportunity of a nice long lunch break to fill the Atlassian blog’s readers in.
It has been quite a journey so far. Everything started on Monday with a kick off party at Atlassian headquarters in San Francisco. The event turned into a bit of a hack session as the buspreneurs were finishing up the features of the website for launch the next morning which came a little too early as the bus left around 6:30 a.m. and the site still wasn’t finished. More hacking between San Francisco and Cupertino for a visit to HP’s Executive Briefing Center for a session innovation with Phil McKinney, HP’s CTO.
After an inspirational talk about how to come up with innovative ideas the team got profile photos taken and we were off to LA. Between San Francisco and LA the group split into teams and conceived their ideas. This is when the fun really started as there were only a few short hours to solidify the idea before pitching it to random people in Santa Monica on video. Video that we haven’t been able to upload – but there is a LOT of content!
The bus continued on to Palm Springs for some rest (or I think its called rest – I haven’t had any for a while).
Unfortunately my lunch break is almost over so I will need to fill you in on day two of the bus ride later, so stay tuned.
Incidently the Startup that I’m working on is called BeNeighbor.ly – which is a site that promises to bring together people in need with people who want to help. More details on that can be found on The Startup Bus blogs. As a fun little game people can invest virtual dollars in the startups you like best. So make our day and go invest in your favorite! (beneighbor.ly 🙂
Signing off for now.